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On Theory vs Practice and Spartan Minimalism with Musonius Rufus (Episode 25)
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“Musonius used to say that it was the height of shamelessness to think about how weak our bodies are when enduring pain, but to forget how weak they are when experiencing pleasure.”
In this podcast, Michael and I discuss the Roman Socrates, Musonius Rufus. Musonius Rufus was the teacher of Epictetus. He played a crucial role building Roman Stoicism. In this podcast we talk about who he was, what writings we have from him, and three key practical ideas from his thought: the division between theory and practice, Spartan minimalism, and egalitarianism.
(01:40) Introduction
(09:31) Theory vs Practice
(17:33) Spartan Minimalism
(31:35) Egalitarianism
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
And I'll read a quote here from one of his lectures. And he talks about different types of training. And he says, one type of training would be appropriate only for the soul, something like studying philosophy. Another would be appropriate for both soul and body. And we will train both soul and body when we accustom ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, scarcity of food, hardness of bed, abstaining from pleasures, and enduring pains.
00:00:27
Speaker
Through these methods and others like them, the body is strengthened and the soul is strengthened as it is trained for courage by enduring hardships and trained for self-control by abstaining from pleasures.
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. In this episode, Michael and I discuss the Roman philosopher, Musonius Rufus,
00:01:02
Speaker
Musonius Rufus is less well known than the Big Three Roman Stoics, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. This episode goes some way in trying to fix that. We talk about who he was, what writings we have from him, and three key practical ideas from his thought. The focus on theory and practice, Spartan minimalism, and egalitarianism.
Musonius Rufus' Influence and Philosophy
00:01:31
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoa. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And my name is Michael Trombley.
00:01:40
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about Musonius Rufus. Musonius is one of the less well-known Roman Stoics, but he was importantly influential. He was the teacher of Epictetus and lived at the same time. Epictetus did, of course, but also was a contemporary of Seneca.
00:02:04
Speaker
So with that, we thought it'd be very important to talk about what we have, which is not as much material on Rufus, but what we do have on him. So do you want to take it away, Michael? Yeah, thanks Caleb. Interested in talking about Lisonius for the reasons you pointed out. Important thinker, kind of if there is a direct lineage, if you want to start to make those claims, there's a line between him to Epictetus, to Marcus Aurelius, so an influential line there.
00:02:34
Speaker
And also, if Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are credited with this turn of Stoicism towards this really practical lived philosophy, this heavy emphasis in the Roman Stoics on ethics, applied philosophy, then Massonnius Rufus is certainly in that tradition.
Theory vs Practice in Stoicism
00:02:54
Speaker
And probably, I think, as we'll talk about later, even more practical or more kind of contextual or situational in his philosophy than
00:03:03
Speaker
Epictetus, his student. So I wanted to start off with some biographical information or the background about Mason's history, who he was as a person, what the little that we do know. And then the structure that I wanted to have was to go over three, I think, distinct and important parts of his philosophy. So one is the division between theory and practice, which is something that we see in Epictetus, but I would argue really started in Missonius Rufus, this view that
00:03:33
Speaker
There are two parts of philosophy. There's the theory you need to understand, you need to read books, you need to learn, you need to listen to podcasts like you're doing now. And then there's practice, training, lived experience, attempting to put it into practice. And that sharp divide is something he establishes in his worth.
00:03:50
Speaker
Second one is one, I think in align with that practice aspect, is really a focus on minimalism, a focus on the value of hardship and the corrupting nature or the danger of luxury.
00:04:06
Speaker
Now, obviously as a Stoic, any sort of, you know, any sort of wealth is going to be an indifference that preferred indifferent at that, you know, better, better, all things being equal, better to have wealth, better to have luxury than not. Phommosomnus Rufus was very cautious about the harmful effect.
00:04:24
Speaker
We have too much comfort or having too easy of a life could have on our character or our progression. And the third part of his philosophy I'm going to talk about is egalitarianism or this view on the equality of people. Something that I really like about stoicism, this view that all people are equal as rational beings. All people have equal access to a good life and equal opportunity to be great and achieve virtue.
00:04:46
Speaker
And the Sony surface was one of the people that not only believed that, but actively argued for it. And we have the arguments. We have his arguments still remaining.
00:04:56
Speaker
So with that in mind, I'm going to jump into a bit of his biography. So, Massonius was born in Volcini, Turia, between 20 and 30. So, you know, right in that pivotal time of the Roman Empire, before Epictetus reached his heyday and was really in the prime of his teaching. And so that's a part of central Italy, north of Rome. It's now around where modern-day Tuscany is.
00:05:22
Speaker
So he was born there, but he gained his fame and his reputation as a Stoic teacher in Rome. And like many Stoics at the time or philosophers at the time, Rome had kind of a tumultuous relationship with philosophy. He was banished from Rome along with other philosophers by Nero in 60 AD. He returned in 62 AD and then was banished again to a small remote Greek island. Even though that island, and that's an island, Gyaros, which is currently uninhabited,
00:05:51
Speaker
So there's nobody there now, and there was certainly not many people there at the time, but he was still able to form a small community of philosophers there, still able to still teach during that time. And then he eventually returned to Rome under Galba, the sixth emperor. And it was in this time in that, I guess, third return that he was most likely a teacher of Epictetus and began mentoring, instructing Epictetus in Stoic philosophy.
00:06:17
Speaker
And he likely died in Rome around 180. So that kind of situates him in a very politically significant time. And we don't have much about him other than that, but what we do know, or we do have more about his philosophy. There is parts of his philosophy that remains.
00:06:36
Speaker
So in terms of the sources we have and that we're pulling from, we don't know if Massonius wrote anything for publication himself. If he did, we don't have it. But what we do have is a collection of lectures and sayings recorded and preserved by his students. This might sound familiar. This is the same reason we have Epictetus. People would come to Massonius Rufus's lectures or learn from him, and they would write it down. They would record it.
00:07:05
Speaker
And these recordings were preserved, copied over and kept. And that's what we have access to. So very different than someone like Aristotle. If you read any Aristotle, we have, we have a lot of his writings. We have our, his lecture notes. They're not meant to be speeches, but they're written by Aristotle themselves. If you look at Plato, you have things that were meant to be read, dialogues meant to be read by other people, these kinds of stories.
00:07:29
Speaker
Sony's Rufus-like Epictetus, we have these intense philosophical debates with other people, or these ruminations or these ideas about certain topics, and you're left with that to really construct and build out the rest of the worldview from there.
00:07:44
Speaker
It's around, what we have remaining is around 60 to 80 pages. So less than Seneca, less than Marcus Aurelius, less than Epictetus, but still a reasonable amount, less than the big three Roman Stoics, but still worth reading. Still, still enough out there to get a kind of sense of his philosophy and his contributions to stoic thought. Um, before I jump into the, the first topic of theory and practices, anything you wanted to add about the Sonia says background life sources.
The Balance of Theory and Practice
00:08:14
Speaker
Just to give people more of a sense of what we have written about Sunyas Rufus looks like, we have a large collection of what would essentially be lectures or discourses very similar to Epictetus's discourses.
00:08:29
Speaker
that are organized thematically. So there are titles like that exiles non-evil, on training, that one should disdain hardships. They range from general themes to really quite specific ones on like what is the chief end of marriage on food.
00:08:47
Speaker
and so on. So that's the bulk of what we have for Musonius Rufus, and then we also have a collection of saints or fragments from a variety of other biographers or philosophers that mention things that Musonius Rufus was likely to have said.
00:09:04
Speaker
And then finally, there are a handful of letters, maybe two letters, and I don't really know the status of their authenticity, but there are layered letters that Musonius Rufus wrote to either potential students or one in which he wrote to a philosopher who was imprisoned at the same time he was during the reign of Nero. So that's what we have. It's pretty similar in a sense to have a fetus, as you said, but not as many words, unfortunately.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, speaking about the fact that it's split up into these lectures on specific topic, that's really the strength and weakness of Masonic's writing.
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah, I'm looking at my book now. You know, lecture on whether daughters should get the same education as sons. Whether a philosopher will file suit against someone who's assaulted. You know, what is the suitable occupation for a philosopher? The lecture about sexual matters. This kind of specificity is the really interesting. If you're interested in that, what would a stoic have to say about that? The downside is
00:10:02
Speaker
You know, you don't get access to a really robust system and you have to rely on other philosophers for that. But luckily, when we have access to that robust system, you can go online and get these other stoic sources at the same time. So the first thing I wanted to jump into about Missoni's Rufus is this division between theory and practice. So this is something we see fully developed in Epictetus. Epictetus talks about this a lot. He argues that theory and practice are both necessary for virtue, but neither is on their own sufficient.
00:10:32
Speaker
So the idea is that, you know, the person who comes and just studies stoic philosophy, they cannot become a good person. They'll not achieve virtue unless they start putting that into practice. They, you know, one thing we focus on a lot here at Stoa is it's right, whether that's meditation, whether that is journaling, whether that is, you know, kind of an active reflection on theory and really intentionally trying to reflect on your beliefs and how they should change given stoic arguments.
00:11:02
Speaker
That's something that, you know, Epictetus was very clear. If you don't do that, you can't become a good person.
00:11:07
Speaker
But the flip side also is that if you neglect theory, if you don't have a foundational understanding and all you have is practice, well, that's not good enough either. And what's interesting when you go back and you read Missonius is you see, well, this is clearly where Epictetus gets this from, right? He gets this straight from Missonius and his argument. So Missonius argues that we need both, but he does interestingly put this emphasis on practices. Practice is more important
00:11:36
Speaker
but it has to follow theory. As theory tells us how to act, but practice is what makes us act properly. And one great quote he has on this, he gives the example of a musician, but also gives the example of a doctor. So he says, suppose there are two doctors, one of them can talk about medical matters as if he had the greatest possible acquaintance with them, but has never actually cared for sick people.
00:11:58
Speaker
The other doctor is not able to talk about medical matters, but is experienced in healing in accordance with medical theory. Which one would you choose as your doctor if you were ill? And the answer there should be obvious is that, you know, you would choose the person who's had the experience doing, even if they're not able to explain why it's right. Even if they're not able to explain, I do this surgery or this procedure because it's in accordance with this book or this person that taught me, you know, if they had the experience doing it, it's worked. That person is in a better spot.
00:12:28
Speaker
And another quote by him is that practice is more important than theory because it more effectively leads humans to actions than theory does. So again, this emphasis on action and practice as the way to bridge that gap. He has another example with a musician and he says, you know, just as the musician must learn theory and then train rigorously, so must the philosopher. So just like any other craft, music is this combination of theory and practice, but so is philosophy, except
00:12:58
Speaker
We as philosophers actually need more practice than musicians because we've been corrupted over our lives. So the argument here is that if it's your first time picking up a guitar, you're neutral. You don't have any good habits. You don't have any bad habits.
00:13:14
Speaker
But as people, we need theory and practice, but we actually need more practice than people do in other crafts because we've been corrupted or we've learned bad habits or we've indulged in our anger or cowardice or selfishness. We've kind of built up these, these poor characteristic before we come to philosophy.
00:13:32
Speaker
Um, so that's something I really resonate with. That's the way that I think about philosophy. That's the way I practice stoicism. I love this emphasis on practice. I also like that it holds us accountable to, you know, don't go too far. It's important, but you still need the theory. You can't just, you can't just make it up on your own. You still need an understanding of why it's right or why this is the right way to act. But something that I really love about Epictetus and it's cool to see that mirrored in Missonia.
Practical Stoicism in Action
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's sort of a psychological insight he has, perhaps an insight he has from teaching or just generally being observant, which is that practice leads more easily to action than theory does. And the role of theory is to know where ultimately your actions end up. But once that's determined, there's less need for our words and more need for practice and doing, of course.
00:14:29
Speaker
I enjoyed rereading that section in preparation for this just because it's not exactly what I had in mind or what you had in mind when we crafted a lot of our pieces for Stoa, but it is a part of the background assumption that you have this division between theory and practice, and as soon as the theory is squared away, then now it's time to put it into practice. Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
We've talked about this on the channel before. I think Tidus loves to make fun of the people who really show off their intellectual knowledge or their ability to recite arguments as if that's evidence of progress. But also I think if you are getting to that intermediate level with stoicism,
00:15:14
Speaker
The argument that virtue is knowledge can make it seem like theory is the way to get there, can make it seem like reading is the way to get there. But ultimately, you know, one of the things that I argue in one of my particular interpretations of stoicism is that there's a kind of knowledge that comes from practice, right? A self-knowledge about your failures, or not your failures, but self-knowledge about where you need to improve.
00:15:37
Speaker
There's also a kind of self-knowledge of what you really do believe and what you don't, and you see that kind of demonstrated if you're able to be brave or cowardly, kind or generous. You see what parts of stoic theory you've internalized and been able to digest and been able to actualize. So I don't think the argument here is that virtue is not knowledge. I think the argument here is that practice
00:16:02
Speaker
Like the musician, you're learning something when you practice, mainly you're learning how to play an instrument. And when you practice being a good person, you're learning how to be a good person in these kinds of moments. Something that I like to keep in mind.
00:16:18
Speaker
One thing that this brings to mind right now, one thing that just came to mind is that this idea that there's a strong difference between theory and practice and that one ought to focus on practice because it's much more closely related to action might be part of what explains why so much of what we have left over from Mersonius Rufus is exceptionally specific to the circumstances that the Romans found themselves in when the time he was philosophizing.
00:16:48
Speaker
So he has explicit advice on what's the actual vocation a philosopher should take, that he says it's farming. So it's not in any way relevant, at least it's very arguably not relevant to lives like ours today, but perhaps the meta-lesson, if you will, is that there is something when you are doing theory, when you are philosophizing,
00:17:10
Speaker
There's a large benefits of being very close to whatever circumstance you find yourself in. And thinking through these specific problems, what vocation should I take on? What should I eat? Should I prosecute someone for personal assault? Which would be the sorts of things that miscellaneous lectured on, as opposed to perhaps spending too much time on these broader questions. Yeah. And then also in this context, right?
00:17:36
Speaker
of somebody who would have access to Zeno and the writings of Zeno and the writings of Chrysippus. And it's like, look, we've got the, you know, we've got the masters, we've got the foundation here. Your issue is not a lack of foundation. Your issue is that application, is that next phase, as you said. And so I think that's exactly right, but that's why he would, that's what he would focus on directing his students. Along the same lines of that relationship between theory and practice, we're really staying in the domain of practice. Another part of his philosophy that's really interesting, I call it minimalism.
00:18:06
Speaker
There's probably a different way to word it. But this is the idea that, you know, Massoni, he's not aesthetic, so he doesn't believe, you know, we need to force physical trauma onto ourselves to progress. But he really does argue when you read his writings that our character is shaped by our surroundings. And if we had to choose, it's better to be challenged by too little than challenged by too much.
00:18:32
Speaker
And so there's this great passage he has where he says, for two individuals, one who's been raised in luxury, one who's had everything they wanted, you know, had all the fine foods, slept in a nice bed. And then another individual who was raised as a spark in, you know, they slept on the ground. They did all this intense physical training.
00:18:51
Speaker
And then you taught them, you introduced stoicism to them. And you said, look, wealth isn't a good. You don't need wealth to be happy. Or you would say, these things are just preferred indifference. They're not actually what really matters.
00:19:08
Speaker
And he said, Missoni has asked his students, you know, who would more likely accept stoicism? Because the Spartan, you know, said he gives this example of this, this, this student where they were like, how amazing is the student?
The Role of Hardship in Stoicism
00:19:22
Speaker
The Spartan boy comes up to them and says, oh, but like the Stoics teach that pain isn't a good, but isn't pain a good, like, isn't pain a good thing? And the joke there is that Missoni is so impressed by this person because that person is closer
00:19:37
Speaker
to stoic truth, closer to stoic wisdom than the person who is fighting over the idea of pleasure being not a... And so I know in my own practice, when I'm doing, for example, martial arts or military, there's definitely something to be said for this or sport where people that have kind of done difficult things
00:20:04
Speaker
Uh, and those are, there's a lot of other difficult things besides those examples, but those are just the kind of environment I find myself in. Those people who have done difficult things are a lot more receptive to stoic teaching than those that haven't. And, you know, maybe this view is that they haven't been corrupted by the opposite side, or maybe the view is that those difficult things have kind of revealed something, some truth to them. And so, so that's one argument is this kind of this, this.
00:20:27
Speaker
advocating for minimalism, the corrupting nature of luxury. Another idea that he talks about along the same line is that the benefit to this minimalism is this recognition that the soul is trained for hardships by enduring pain and abstaining from pleasure. So this idea that there can be a kind of character development when you're forced to endure difficult situations.
00:20:49
Speaker
And I'll read a quote here from one of his lectures. And he talks about different types of training. And he says, one type of training would be appropriate only for the soul, something like studying philosophy. Another would be appropriate for both soul and body. And we will train both soul and body when we accustom ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, scarcity of food, hardness of bed, abstaining from pleasures, and enduring pains.
00:21:16
Speaker
Through these methods and others like them, the body is strengthened and the soul is strengthened as it is trained for courage by enduring hardships and trained for self-control by abstaining from pleasures. I'll let you jump in in a second, Caleb, but...
00:21:31
Speaker
I thought this was actually quite interesting because some Stoke communities advocate for these things like cold showers, advocate for sleeping on the floor, things like this. And there's almost this pushback. I see from Stoke communities online and say, no.
00:21:47
Speaker
You don't need a cold shower. You don't need to kind of force any hardship. You just need to contemplate these ideas. And I see it's almost the other argument here, the explicit argument that look, if you do certain things, you'll both train your body and your soul. Your body gets stronger because it's like it's doing, you know, it's physically training, but your soul's getting stronger because it's practicing moderation. It's practicing self-control. Interested for your thoughts on that.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, so just to try to summarize, what we have is this minimalist picture. Perhaps, you know, you can think of it as a Spartan minimalist view. Neither Spartan nor minimalist exactly gets at the view perfectly. But the thought is that it's kind of an aesthetic view. And why would you want to be
00:22:31
Speaker
aesthetic. Well, one is that sort of undergoing these voluntary hardships by doing that you fail to corrupt yourself in a way that experiencing luxury can do.
00:22:47
Speaker
you remain free from any temptations or false beliefs, particular kinds of pleasures might promote or might make it easier to have. That's one. And then the second one is while you train, while you face these discomforts, you're actively training to become a better stoic.
00:23:10
Speaker
That's my summarization of the two main reasons that he is a Spartan minimalist. One of the sayings that is collected in a popular translation of his work as the following. Apparently, he used to say that it was the height of shamelessness to think about how weak our bodies are when enduring pain, but to forget how weak they are when experiencing pleasure.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's that thought. It's a very good line. I think it's that thought that promotes this idea of Spartan minimalism that it is, you know, it is easy to remember, oh, when you're in the thick of it, some stressful or painful event, especially perhaps during exercising that, oh, yes, the body's weak. What matters is that I keep the mind strong, if you will. But it's harder to have that view where you
00:24:02
Speaker
steal yourself against pleasure that feels good at the moment, but might lead to worse decisions or worse judgments down the line. Yeah, great summary. And again, in that contemporary context, I see stoicism communities kind of wrestling with this.
00:24:18
Speaker
How much physical training is necessary? Is there a role for physical training? How much should we be abstaining from pleasures versus indulging, but recognizing them as a preferred indifference? I would say taking the hardest line on this from anybody I've ever read.
00:24:34
Speaker
I don't know if there's a stoic that goes this far elsewhere, happy for anyone, you know, anyone listening to point out some, send us a message and point out some other quotes, but this is a topic I'm pretty interested in that. And I think he takes the hardest stance here. Yeah. I would say coming back to the contemporary question, you know, there's this debate, how important are things like cold showers in your study practice and how important are things like fasting, sleeping on the floor?
00:25:01
Speaker
The unsatisfying answer is that it just must be context specific. So I think Musonius Rufus is correct that voluntary hardship can help you train for other painful experiences down the line. And it can also help with some of these corrupting aspects of pleasure or good experiences.
00:25:26
Speaker
And there's also this additional sort of impact of keeping the fact that prosperity is really a contingent matter. It is a sort of Seneca's line, right? That one should never trust prosperity and not sort of be lulled into a sense that everything is good right now and it's going to stay good forever or something like this. So there's maybe that practical, that reasoning planning benefit as well.
00:25:53
Speaker
And for many people, I think that practice is useful. Of course, sometimes there can be too much focus on the practice and you might focus more on how many cold showers you've had. What your cold shower streak is, is compared to your courageous action streak outside of the shower. So I think that's always the argument against these sorts of things is that, look, they're good training and they have some serious benefits.
00:26:18
Speaker
but merely setting up an entire culture around this sort of things would miss what ultimately matters, what you're training for. Yeah, that's a great point. One thing I wanted to add here, so again, yeah, so one concern you have or one thing we have to be careful about is look,
00:26:37
Speaker
That might be a mechanism to enable progress, but it's not a replacement for progress. You don't say, look, I have an excellent cold shower streak. I'm done. I, you know, wipe my hands. I go, I'm now excellent stoic. And it's kind of an inward looking aspect, as you said, instead of courageous actions, you know, just actions, having the stoicism be not just an ability to kind of endure, but ability to go out and act well as well.
00:27:02
Speaker
Another way to read it, I think it's probably both of these, but another way to read it is also as a caution about luxury. So not an indulgence in misery, but a caution about luxury. And one quote that supports this from Lassoni's lectures is, quote, I would therefore choose to be sick rather than live in luxury because being sick harms the body only. Living in luxury harms both body and soul by making the body weak and the soul undisciplined and cowardly.
00:27:31
Speaker
So the idea that hardship only harms the body, but luxury harms the body and the soul. So, so maybe not, maybe not.
00:27:42
Speaker
There is this aspect of there's, there's benefits of physical training, but there's this other aspect of, you know, be cautious. Recognize how weak you're being when you're engaging in pleasure and luxury, not just when you're kind of wrestling with how hard things are to, or how weak you can be if you, if you start becoming reliant or dependent on, you know, the luxury in the moment.
00:28:04
Speaker
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00:28:23
Speaker
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00:28:36
Speaker
With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different, difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. One last thing I want to say on the Spartan minimalism is related to the context, specificity of this sort of advice. And it's important to remember that Musonius Rufus was talking to Roman aristocrats.
00:29:01
Speaker
So, he has a lecture entitled on furnishings, which is a minimalist in the contemporary sense where he essentially says, you shouldn't get, you know, all these ivory marble expensive furnishings because they're not that useful. They don't improve your life that much and there's a high risk they'll get stolen or something to that effect. I don't have the passage in front of me. And that's the sort of concern that a Roman aristocrat might have.
00:29:27
Speaker
only a minority of Romans would be able to afford that sort of thing. So I think that's important to keep in mind when he is counseling against luxury, is that that's a risk for his audience. Yeah, that's a great thing to add. So what you're saying, Caleb, is
00:29:44
Speaker
We're sitting here being like, wow, Massonius is so hardcore, but really he's saying, you know, don't have, give away half of your statues. And everybody's like, oh, how could I survive with half my statues? There's a thought that he'd be even more hardcore towards us because, you know, there is this sort of, I think, there's a political scientist named Vaclav Smil who really cares about energy. And he said something like,
00:30:09
Speaker
Look, the amount of energy the modern American has available to them is about the same amount of energy as a rich Roman with about 200 slaves has available to them. You know, the sorts of things we would take for granted, like being able to turn a light on in any room at any time, being able to have EV access to food might push, might cause, you know, Userni's Rufus to be at least hardcore towards many of us in the developed world.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to have to, you know, take a look at my furnishings, do some, do some evaluation after this, but no, great point, right? Like, let me, it's easy to think about, it's easy to think about rich, poor, luxury, lacking in kind of relative terms and to identify to say, well, I'm not an aristocrat, but then in, in these kinds of absolute terms, no, we have access to a lot of things Romans didn't have access to. I mean, as you said, maybe the average person is on par with an aristocrat. So, you know,
00:31:05
Speaker
And we see that, right? We see that in kind of phone addiction or lack of the benefit of premeditations of evil or contemplation of death, because death is not something we are exposed to on a day-to-day moment. We see that manifested. It's a good thing. I'm glad we have a better quality of life than the average Roman.
Gender Equality in Stoic Philosophy
00:31:23
Speaker
But it can manifest in certain kind of dependencies or normalization of levels of luxury that someone writing 2,000 years ago would not be using.
00:31:33
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, points. So moving on to the last one, I want to talk about, I want to talk about Mausonius Rufus' egalitarianism. There is, you know, a lot of people would argue that the Stoics were maybe proto-feminists, maybe were very accepting of women compared to, certainly compared to people contemporaries, you know, like Aristotle and Plato. I might be wrong here, but I think there's some sort of,
00:32:01
Speaker
I do remember at least people talking about there being a passage in Aristotle about women being kind of deficient men because they don't have as many teeth as men do. And this kind of outrage that Aristotle never went and counted how many teeth women have, just kind of making these claims. And there's something to be said for differences or kind of understanding this cultural context about very different roles between men and women. But when we talk about role ethics,
00:32:29
Speaker
One of the things we emphasize in royal ethics in stoicism, we've talked about this in the last couple of episodes, is the highest role, the role that unifies all people is roles as kind of as rational agents, as choice making things, as human beings with minds that have a ruling faculty, a rational faculty. And then you have your naturally acquired roles and the roles you take on in your life. But when you get to the point of, you know, wife or daughter,
00:32:56
Speaker
or these kind of rules, these are already below that prime rule we all share in common, that prime kind of calling of being the best kind of rational agent you can be, the best stoic you can be. And we're talking about those arguments that's really coming from Massonius here. He's the one who really talks about this explicitly and really makes the argument explicitly about the equality of men and women and the right of women to a philosophical education and the ability for women to be just as virtuous or excellent as men in this regard.
00:33:24
Speaker
Maybe parent and obvious does, but quite progressive and insightful for 50 AD. I'll read a passage here which is asking, should women engage in philosophy? Should women be given an education in stoic philosophy?
00:33:44
Speaker
Okay, silly question, now very relevant or, you know, heated question back then. Emma Sony says argument here is, women have received from the gods the same reasoning power as men. Likewise, the same senses as the male. Likewise, likewise as well, each has the same parts of the body.
00:34:03
Speaker
In addition, a desire for virtue and an affinity for it belong by nature not only to men but also to women. Since this is so, why would it be appropriate for men but not for women to seek to live honorable lives and consider how to do so, which is what studying philosophy is.
00:34:21
Speaker
Is it appropriate for men to be good, but not women? That last part being a rhetorical question being, obviously it's appropriate for women to live well. Obviously it makes sense for them to want to seek to live honorably and to study how to do so, which is what philosophy is. I don't know. That kind of stuff pumps me up. I always like to see when I always like to see stoicism, you know, or any, any ancient philosopher really get something right or be ahead of their times and really innovate in terms of what the cultural norms would have been pushing against.
00:34:52
Speaker
That's one of the key of Stoicism that Stoics were early on is that humans share our ability to reason. And because we share our ability to reason, studying philosophy is useful for everyone. And there is no need to explicitly bar women or people of particular ethnicities from the study of philosophy, which of course,
00:35:19
Speaker
obvious now, but back in the day, there were explicitly schools set up for teaching men philosophy only. And I think the Epicureans and the Stoics and perhaps a few others were exceptions in that norm. But yeah, I think it is always good to see the signs of proto-feminism, even if not for completely developed liberal view in the classical sense about the sexes.
00:35:47
Speaker
Yeah. And so to build on that, I mean, the part that I now got, I always knew that. So going back and rereading the Sony is in preparation for this podcast. The other thing I saw is that, okay, well he believes that at the high roll level, but then the low, but it's not total equality. And that's that, that is, you know, something to keep in mind when you're talking about this.
00:36:06
Speaker
There's egalitarianism at the highest role, but then in terms of what it means to be an honorable woman, how that manifests in terms of what it means to act well as a woman is actually going to end up looking quite a bit different than a man when we get down into these kind of particular roles of wife, daughter, sister, and so on and so forth.
Applying Philosophy to Daily Life
00:36:26
Speaker
He talks about how sudden philosophy is going to help women be better at what they're supposed to do. And what they're supposed to do is to take care of the house well, manage the estate well.
00:36:37
Speaker
be an excellent guardian for their husband and their children. So there is this view that, you know, they should, they should study how to live horribly, but then what it looks like in those particular roles is still built up in gender roles. So I don't want anybody thinking that, you know, so he was, was, was stepping outside of this context. He was still within this context. And, and so, but that was at the level of kind of these particular roles, not at the level of women and men, essentially as humans in their essential nature.
00:37:03
Speaker
And the other part to that, because interesting, you talked at the start about this, this emphasis on practical action. And he says this here, which he warns against in women. So he says he warns against women taking up philosophy and then doing philosophy instead of taking care of the house, instead of managing the estate.
00:37:21
Speaker
getting caught up in these kind of theoretical debates, but he also is worried about that happening for men too. And here's another quote, he says, there is no way that I would expect women who pursue philosophy, or even men for that matter, to cast aside their appropriate tasks and concern themselves with words only. But I say that they should pursue the discussions they undertake for the sake of action. So the idea there being that
00:37:48
Speaker
Look, you're worried that your wives will get caught up in all this philosophizing. It's like, I'm also worried that you as men will get caught up in all this philosophizing. Anybody who does that, anybody who sits around and talks and is just interested in words and not action, now you've got a problem. But I think that if you let women study philosophy, they'll be better in their actions. And that's the priority. Likewise, that's the priority for you as well as men, as the men I'm speaking to, you also want to study to do better in your action.
00:38:16
Speaker
So why are you, you know, why stop women from pursuing improvement in fulfilling their, you know, their gender, typical rules, because you're worried about them, them getting caught up in talking. They should focus. They should do that so they can do that better as I should. Right. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And, and really that, that, that, that's what I wanted to say about that. And, and I think, I think valuable to come back to that, you know,
00:38:43
Speaker
that was clear that cosmopolitanism, that egalitarianism was something that was being explicitly argued for, you know, in 50 AD Rome, I think is pretty cool and has led into, you know, I'm not a, I'm not an expert on the, on the history of philosophy or the history of women in philosophy, but not something I think you really see argued for that strongly, at least as I'm aware of until
00:39:11
Speaker
You know, John Stuart Mill, I think becomes the next kind of person that people say years later. So quite innovative here. Anything, any, any thoughts on Missoni's Rufuses?
00:39:21
Speaker
arguments for the equality of people. One thing that related line that stuck out to me from Musonius is sort of on this question of addressing a student who's worried that marriage will take him away from the ability to do philosophy, which is a funny question. It's sort of like the question people sometimes have, you know, should I have kids? Will that be too much of a sacrifice for my career or something of that sort?
00:39:47
Speaker
And his answer was, well, marriage didn't hinder Pythagoras or Socrates. And both of those guys had a wife and they're probably the best philosophers. So I think you can still get married. Or this idea again, I mean, coming back to that point, you study philosophy so you can be better in your marriage. I mean, if you don't want to be married, that's fine. That's up to you. But
00:40:11
Speaker
To look at philosophy as something opposed to being a good partner or opposed to being a great husband or wife, you're getting something wrong there. You're mixing something up, for sure.
00:40:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I spoke with David Jilk a while back, who's an investor or author type, and he has a book called The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche, which includes commentary from himself and his co-author Brad Feld, but also some stories from other entrepreneurs. And there was one story that stuck out for me there where this is a guest writer and he says, you know, I woke up one morning and my wife asked me to mow the lawn and
00:40:54
Speaker
My startup wasn't doing so well and I just had all these obligations and I was so busy. And then I realized, oh, my neighbor mowed my lawn. That's great. And then my wife made some remark to the extent of, yeah, he has a much more successful startup than you do and seems a lot more busy.
00:41:11
Speaker
which is always this thought of somewhat related, I suppose, to not letting one's social roles conflict unnecessarily and thinking through about marriage, philosophy, career, and so on. And it's easy to lose sight of what it takes to be good in each of those roles. And one way to sort of gain motivation is that it's people who are
00:41:35
Speaker
very good at all of them, often find some way to make it work. Of course there are going to be exceptions, you're going to need to make trade-offs, but having the sort of relentless resourcefulness at figuring out how to make it all work is always a good thing.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think the point, the point there that struck me is don't have them click conflict unnecessarily. Sometimes there were, sometimes they'll conflict, but don't kind of create these stories or, you know, add extra tension between those, those roles when they don't need to be intention.
Conclusion and Future Discussions
00:42:08
Speaker
Right, right. Excellent. Well, we covered a good set of ideas from Musonius. He has a lot more work on. He has some related stuff on food. He thought what we ate was very important. He gave specific advice about marriage and about the role that marriage family should have in one's life, which I think is both wise and somewhat context specific. But there's always more to talk about here, so we should make sure to do another one on Musonius.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. It was fun. There you go. Perfect. Ciao later. Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:42:59
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.